Pelé hated wakes and said he was not afraid of death, just ‘afraid’

Pele hated wakes. Every time he was asked by his faithful squire and friend Pepito Fornos if he was going to say goodbye to a friend or dead personality, Pelé would answer: no, he would not.

“I’m only going to my wake because there’s no other way,” he said.

There is no precise estimate, but thousands of people should pass through Vila Belmiro between this Monday (2nd) and Tuesday (3rd) to say goodbye to the King of Football. He died last Thursday (29), due to kidney failure, heart failure, bronchopneumonia and colon adenocarcinoma.

Pelé hated the idea of ​​seeing dead people, according to people interviewed by the Sheetbecause it was the opposite of the image he wanted to project: that of invincibility.

One of the stories that most irritated Coutinho in the love-hate relationship with the number 10 was not when the two shared the attack and the center forward wore a white bracelet. Sometimes he supported the story that he did that to differentiate himself from Pelé. At other times, he denied it.

In the same way he could use the expression “king” to refer to his former colleague as irony. He also came out from time to time as a bow.

Coutinho got irritated even when, with a gray head, he met Pelé and heard him say that he didn’t have a single gray hair.

“Only people get old and he doesn’t?” he would mutter. Coutinho was three years younger than his attacking partner.

It was not the image of old age, of fragility that Pelé wanted to show. The King of Football didn’t like to tell, but he loved it when someone else did, in his presence, about the afternoon he went out on the streets of New York to walk beside the American actor Robert Redford. By the time they reached the designated restaurant, Redford had signed five autographs. Pele, seven.

This was the star who got sponsorship deals that made him travel the world. That wouldn’t happen to a white-haired idol.

According to friends, the sequences of hip surgeries, started in 2012 for the placement of a prosthesis, and the problem in his right knee and the physiotherapy sessions (which he thought were not working) made him aware of his own physical decay . But nothing shook him as much as the death of his brother Zoca, a victim of prostate cancer, in 2020.

“I’m just afraid of not being able to fulfill my commitments. That’s what I don’t want to happen. I hope to stay active”, he said after missing the trip to the World Cup in Russia, in 2018, due to medical recommendations.

It was the time when rumors began to circulate that he was “not well”. All always denied. By his advisors, with irritation. By Pelé himself, with good humour.

He did everything to keep his schedule active despite the restrictions. Hired for the launch event of the Campeonato Carioca in 2018, he traveled by car from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro because the car seat left him in a more comfortable position than the one on the shuttle plane. He confessed that the impossibility of meeting the commercial commitments already agreed on irritated him. It was a realization of one’s own mortality.

More than once his children Kely and Edinho had to talk to him about their commitment to the recovery work. That trips to the hospital were essential, and that this also went for the hated physiotherapy sessions.

“The situation has reversed a little and I have to play the role of his father a little”, said Edinho, in a fun tone, in 2020.

The deaths of Santos’ former teammates, such as Zito, Dorval and Coutinho, brought back to Pelé the perception that he didn’t want, that everything was not as it used to be. He avoided saying “death”. He commented that he was just getting it.

Is not true. From the legendary alvinegro attack, for example, Pepe, 87, and Mengálvio, 83, are alive.

Asked by Sheetin 2018, if he was afraid of death, Pelé preferred to use another term.

“I’m afraid, right? Sometimes you get a little worried. Otherwise, nobody would take medicine.”